I need my website to look different, unique but not complicated. I need something simple, professional, artsy, web 2.0. I want something top notch, but dont charge me too much. Wait are you saying every time you will do work for us, you will charge us?
Unless you are one of the Fortune 1000, with a development and web design team on payroll and you are trying to have a custom looking website, you are most likely an ecommerce noob.
Now dont get me wrong, I am not saying you should not have a content rich, beautifully designed website that is unique to others. What most entrepreneurs fail to understand, is that custom design will lack functionality unless the functionality will be coded into your custom design.
For example, you want a nice looking introduction popup to capture your visitor information, you know those that TigerDirect and Urban Outfitters are using. The popup design itself is easy, but how will you make it popup, where will it popup, for how long will it stay, where will the information be saved that is entered into the popup, and what workflow will come after the information is entered.
If you looked into doing a custom design to your shopping cart website, note that there are millions of lines of code that behind that design. If you purchase one of those custom templates (which is not custom at all since anyone can download it and use it), it is guaranteed you will be lacking a lot of functionality.
As soon as your Shopping Cart provider stops supporting the template you are using, or worse they may have never supported it in the first place, then this is where your business will hit a deadend. Your Shopping Cart can fail altogether, stop taking orders, crash on various screens, and put your business into the ground because you are no longer in sync with the shopping cart functionality. Even if nothing breaks it is just a matter of time before your features are outdated.
Look at eBay and Amazon, their website design remains unchanged after a decade and everyone is happy. eBay and Amazon closes billions of dollars in sales and their sellers use their cookie cutter design. Not only is it cookie cutter but you have competitors selling the same thing within that cookie cutter design. Facebook profiles are the same, Fortune 1000 fan pages just use different graphics, and no one is complaining. My favorite example is Apple, you are not allowed to touch the framework of their app store and your app has to be designed by their standards.
A Shopping Cart is no different, it is a platform, not a high school art project. Are you trying to make money or win a beauty contest?
If you want a custom looking homepage you can have that designed, if you want custom content pages you can have those too. When it comes to Shopping Cart functionality such as product pages, search results, and checkout you do not want to touch that.
Shopping Cart Elite maintains a master template to create an industry standard, and you will always have the latest features with extremely high sales conversions as we are enhancing the platform.